"Though 'flat design' is a popular meme right now, there is something much, much deeper going on here at Microsoft. With my own lifelong passion for design I immersed myself in the community and got a front-row seat on a journey that has its roots as far back as the late '90s with Encarta's bold use of typography and clean interface. But it truly sprang to life in late 2010 with the launch of Windows Phone and in the last few weeks has advanced even further with Windows 8.1 and Xbox One. I started from the very place I bet you are right now - disbelief that Microsoft is leading the way on design." They really are. If Apple really goes all minimalist and digital (I dislike the term 'flat') with iOS, Microsoft will have taken over the baton. Crazy world indeed.

That's part of what I was talking about with the 'inaccessible train wreck' -- alongside the fixed px metric fonts that send me diving for the zoom, which of course breaks the layout; the text colors and background colors being too close together resulting in it being illegible, the complete lack of semantic markup making it near impossible to navigate, etc, etc...

If this is their idea of good design, whoever did it needs to be put down like old yeller.

But then, there's DESIGN and then there's DESIGN -- one is about building something functional and useful, the other is artsy fartsy nonsense designed by people who go "WCAG, what's that?!?" who could give a damn about it actually being usable to visitors, they just want their "gee ain't it neat" artsy BS.